The present invention relates to a multi-function copying apparatus comprising a plurality of copying machines connected to a control unit.
A conventional copying apparatus comprises a single copying machine which operates on the electrostatic or Xerographic principle and produces one copy of one original document per machine operation. Such a copying machine is inherently slow in operation where it is desired to make more than one copy of a single original document.
It is often desired to make a copy consisting of images of two or more original documents superimposed on each other. A conventional copying machine is capable of making such a copy. A copy is made of a first original document. Then, the copy is inserted into a copy paper holder or cassette and fed through the machine again to copy the second original document on top of the image of the first original document. However, such a process is very time consuming and inconvenient.
As an alternative arrangement for making superimposed copies, a first original document is optoelectronically scanned and an electronic image thereof stored in a memory. Then, the second document is scanned and the electronic image thereof combined with the first image while printing a copy. This prior art arrangement is disadvantageous in that a very large and expensive electronic memory is required and only two documents may be superimposed.
Also, it is often desired to make several copies of multi-page documents and collate the resulting copies. This operation may be performed using a conventional copying machine in two ways. The first way involves copying each of the pages in sequence to provide a first multi-page copy, copying each of the pages in sequence again to provide a second multi-page copy, etc. Although this method produces collated copies, it is very time consuming since each page must be manually placed on a platen or the like a number of times equal to the number of copies desired.
The second way to produce collated copies is to copy each page a number of times corresponding to the number of copies desired, then copy the next page the same number of times, etc., and then manually collate the pages.
Although both of these methods produce collated copies, they are both slow, and such conventional copying machines constitute bottlenecks in large business operations. Although auxiliary collation units are available for conventional copying machines, they are complicated, expensive and prone to frequent malfunction.